Caravan to Cuba -- third dispatch

Sorry to those following Route B's journey. Things got very busy, the closer we got to McAllen and then it was really busy. I am sending some more articles that were published in Monday Magazine, a weekly based in Victoria, B.C., Canada

 

 

 

                            Caravanistas visit free speech mecca

                            by Tanya Lester

 

 

                "There comes a time when the operation of the

                 machine becomes so odious, makes you so

                 sick at heart, that you can't take part, you

                 can't even passively take part; and you've

                 got to put your bodies upon the gears and

                 upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and

                 you've got to make it stop. And you've got to 

                 indicate to the people who run it, the people

                 who own it, that unless you're free, the

                 machine will be prevented from working at all."

                                                    -- Mario Savio

                                                      

    In California, the caravanistas on our route take a couple of hours

off to visit the Free Speech Movement Cafe at University of California--

Berkeley Campus.

    This shrine to 1960's and 1970's student radicalism in opposition to the Vietnam War is dedicated to student leader named Mario Savio.

    On the walls and tables of the  tucked-away campus cafe, photographs and historical documents tell the story of mid-September, 1964  when the University administration banned "political expression including information and registration tables, from the only place where these were still tolerated" on a sidewalk in front of the institution.

   At the beginning of October of the same fall, an activist defied the ban, set up a table and was arrested. Three thousand students surrounded the police car holding him. They engaged in a 30 hour public dialogue with the police.

   By early December, 1964, 1200 students occupied Spoul Hall on campus. The sit-in spawned  mass arrests. Ten thousand students went  on strike.

    On December 8, the Academic Senate voted 824 - 115 to support student demands.

    In the cafe, students, plugged into their laptops, seem much more concerned with finishing papers than protesting the latest war, against Iraq.  By the campus gate, a photographer takes shots of a young couple in wedding tuxedo and gown.

    But on the street running into the campus, it is still Beserkley (as caravanista Carol Cross, who live nearby, lovingly calls the city). Among the counter-culture paraphanalia is a t-shirt: Nixon - (picture of) brain = Bush.

                                                  --END--                                        

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